On: The History of Python

[PieSquared]

One of the comments is good. Basically, it asks, why the need for semicolons at all?

[johnrob → PieSquared]

Probably to make it easier for programmers who end lines with them as a knee jerk reaction. After a stint of java or javascript, I find myself doing it too.

[eru → johnrob]

And you can put two or more commands on one line.

[blasdel → eru]

I use them for this purpose in both Python and Ruby when there's a formatting win to be had.

[gaius → eru]

Yeah. Often it's bad style, but IMHO if you just need to do something like:

    x = 0; y = []; z = None

Then it is actually clearer to group them together, it means more "real code" on screen at a time.

[ulf → gaius]

In this case you could just use:

x, y, z = 0, [], None

[eru → gaius]

I do not know whether that was a good example to show the benefits of the semicolon:

    x, y, z = 0, [], None

[lehmannro → eru]

While the semicolon is only a convenience it has some common use cases. For example shoot-and-forget invokations of third party modules:

  import sys; sys.exit()
  import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
  import cgitb; cgitb.enable()
  import psyco; psyco.full()
  import pygtk; pygtk.require('2.0')

And of course it's pretty useful in environments where one-liner are easier to handle:

  $ python -c "import mymod; mymod.test()"

[gaius → lehmannro]

Now that I look in my code I actually have:

    import matplotlib; matplotlib.use('Agg'); from matplotlib import pyplot